Interconnected computer systems, such as those interconnected by the Internet, and the like, provide fast and convenient means for obtaining information from various sources throughout the world, and for sharing the information with others. In the world of the Internet, one of the forms of this information is the web page.
An Internet web page can contain a large amount of information and a large number of individual items, such as text, photographs, moving images and the like. The present invention enables Users to quickly and conveniently focus on and display separately selected items of content of a web page, and to share those selected items with other individuals or systems over the network.
The World Wide Web uses a growing variety of media, styles and elements arranged in the form of web pages. These web pages contain various types of content, including text, pictures and other compelling visual formats. As a rule, web pages have a finite amount of usable space in which to place text, images, and other content. Because of this, the authors of the web pages must make compromises in regards to how much space is reserved for textual information, and how much for the other visual aspects (images, animation, video, etc). An analogy can be made to a newspaper. Each section of the paper is provided its own ‘space’ on the paper itself, with boundaries defining where topics, stories and pictures appear. Since a web page also follows many of these same layout restrictions, elements within a web page are typically restricted to given areas on the page.
One notable difference between the pages of printed matter and the pages of a web site lies in the digital format of the web page. The web page can be dynamic and changeable, whereas the printed pages are fixed and unchanging. But because web pages share much of their layout characteristics with the printed page, even the digital format must obey the space restrictions placed upon it. This is what determines how much space a picture or image gets, in comparison to the text on a page. Text, be it on a printed page or web page, follows normal publishing rules regarding size, font, spacing and other factors affecting the page design. Images, pictures and other rich content, however, are restricted by the remaining limited space available on the page. There is, therefore, a need for a method, system and apparatus that allows users to display selected content from web pages and other sources in separate, scalable, and re-sizable windows.
Often, as users view web pages, they find that they have no easy or practical way to simultaneously view content from two different web pages or web sites. Some of the methods that have been devised to overcome this limitation include launching multiple instances of a web browser, or opening a link in a new window (both launch a new full instance of the browser). This allows users to try to resize the content within each page or browser instance, and fit both on the screen together. Most browsers will resize, but the contents within the page often will not. Additionally, by opening another fully enabled browser instance, users consume more memory resources than one browser instance would consume. By opening a link in a new window (if permitted), users are still running another full browser instance, and downloading that whole page in its entirety, regardless of which part of the page interests them, wasting time and bandwidth. Most web browsers (and web sites) display one web page at a time. To display more than one page, additional browser instances would be opened. There is, therefore, a need for a method, system and apparatus that allows users to simultaneously display selected content from different web pages in a manner that does not require the user to launch multiple fully-enabled browsers.
If a user wants to share web page content with others, the current and easiest existing method is to E-mail a ‘link’ to that content. The user would simply copy the URL in the address bar of their browser and paste it into an E-mail message. Another method that is considerably faster is that of Instant Messaging. Online, the user would copy and paste the URL of the shared web page in real-time. This has significant speed advantages, and allows for an almost ‘virtual meeting’ to take place. Unfortunately, the web pages do not always indicate the URL for the web page a user is viewing. This makes it difficult, if not impossible for the user to ‘share’ the location of this web page with another user. Another problem is caused by dynamic, form driven pages. These pages may have a number of drop-down lists from which the user could choose, or blank fields that might require user input. Because the URL for the resulting page may not be visible to the end user, it is difficult for a user show another user selected content. Much time is wasted by users having to ‘walk’ the other user through the entire web site in order for them to see the same results on their browser. There is, therefore, a need for a method and system that allows users to ‘share’ selected visual content from web pages with other users. There is also, therefore, a need for a method, system and apparatus that allows users to share only selected content from web pages in a manner that saves time and reduces bandwidth use.